The present invention relates to reconfigurable logic chips.
Reconfigurable logic chips, such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have become increasingly popular. Such chips allow logic to implement different circuits at different times.
FPGAs are being increasingly used because they offer greater flexibility and shorter development cycles than traditional Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) while providing most of the performance advantages of a dedicated hardware solution.
One growingly popular use of FPGAs is referred to as reconfigurable computing. In reconfigurable computing, hardware logic functions are loaded into the FPGA as needed to implement different sections of a computationally intensive code. By using the FPGAs to do the computational intensive code, advantages are obtained over dedicated processors. Reconfigurable computing is being pursued by university researchers as well as FPGA companies.
Typically, in order to change configurations, FPGAs load new configuration data for different functional units from off-chip. This can be time consuming and may reduce the efficiency of a reconfigurable computing system. It is desired to have an improved reconfigurable chip for reconfigurable computing.